In modern dairy farm industry there are continuous research and development activities in order to improve the efficiency of various activities such as machine milking, which, inter alia, involve increased milk yield and reduced milking time.
A major trend in this respect is an increased degree of automation of the various activities. For instance, machine milking may be performed by milking robots in a completely automated manner. Such an automatic milking system may take care of milking, feeding, milk inspection, milk sampling, animal traffic, etc. in a large area wherein the dairy animals are walking about freely and are visiting the milking machine voluntarily.
A milking machine involves heavy expenditure and has a limited milk production capacity. Thus, animals having a high milk production should be allowed to be milked more often than animals having a low milk production. The operation and use of a milking machine, which animals are visiting on a voluntary basis, in order to obtain an optimum overall dairy farm performance is an arduous task. An objective is here to safeguard an optimum milk production. Naturally, ethical aspects as well as animal care have to be considered.
EP 0988784 E1 (MAASLAND) discloses a method of automatically milking animals, which are allowed to visit individually a milking parlor comprising a milking robot and an animal identification system. An animal visiting the milking parlor is milked only if at least a specific number of milkings, Q, of other animals has taken place since the last milking of the relevant animal. The number Q is calculated as Q=cM/x, where x is an individual animal parameter indicating how often the relevant animal has to be milked (a high figure for an animal having a high milk production). M is the total number of milkings performed by the robot, and c is a correction factor (between 0.5 and 1), which corrects for the fact that an animal only visits the robot a limited number of times per time unit.
WO 0193666 (DELAVAL) discloses a method of automatically milking animals which are allowed to move freely in an area intended therefore and to visit individually a milking parlor comprising a milking robot and an animal identification system. The method comprises dynamically assigning a milking qualification parameter to each of the animals that are allowed to move freely in the area, the respective milking qualification parameter indicating the degree of suitability that the respective animal, to which the milking qualification parameter is assigned, shall be milked; dynamically ranking the animals in accordance with their respective milking qualification parameters; and milking an animal during a visit to the milking parlor only if the animal is identified as belonging to the X highest ranked animals, i.e. the X animals that are best suited to be milked from a milk production optimization viewpoint, X being a positive integer.